Here’s an excerpt from a case in a nutshell for mobile PCs in schools. It’s a follow-up on the excerpt about What’s Possible with Mobile PCs in School.
Mobile PCs and schools share a core reason for existence. The case is drawn from listening to educators and PC developers talk about their work, sometimes together and sometimes separately, but consistently with the same lesson.
Lesson: Both schools and mobile PCs recognize patterns and provide ways to use these patterns to solve practical, theoretical, and academic problems.
Schools provide a venue for an older generation of people to assist a younger generation to recognize, name, and use common patterns of behavior that constitute their civilization legacy.
Mobile PCs are arguably the most sophisticated computers currently available in the mass market for recognizing a broad range of written and spoken patterns used in schools and to assist students to learn efficiently how to use these patterns to solve problems.
Tip: An increasing number of educators and students use mobile PCs in schools for an uncounted likely hundreds of thousands transactions a year in an effort to learn more than without these machines.
Hmmm. I think I’ll try to calculate an estimate number of transactions and report that later. Given the growing deployment of Tablet PCs and Ultra-Mobile PCs in schools, the number must be more than seven or eight figures instead of six figures and perhaps monthly instead of yearly? This would make an interesting term paper for someone, or maybe expand it into an undergraduate senior thesis.
Source of excerpt: Heiny, R., et al. (2007). Mobile PCs in Schools. (Released soon on TabletPCPost.com) (Yes, it needs editing before release.)